[EVENT] IN THE WAKE OF XI TIANLONG

[khuimods]

Characters: All
Date: January 2019
Location: Around Aifaran
Situation: The archipelago is recovering from the megastorm, Xi Tianlong, and a Watcher has sailed into Aifaran's port.
Warnings/Rating: Mentions of death and devastation resulting from a natural disaster; use additional warnings as needed.


The force of the storm and the chaos it wrought - both mundane and metaphysical - has given rise to its name: Xi Tianlong. The Black Sky Dragon left devastation in its wake and many areas are still flooded. The first priority is to ensure the safety and security of everyone living in the archipelago. Anyone of sound mind and body is expected to join the recovery efforts.

I. THE WORK BEGINS

Volunteers may report to operation and logistics outposts run by Sentry and city officials to assist with a wide variety of tasks. Each outpost reports to an overarching emergency operations center, where almost all leadership decisions are being made from.

At a given outpost, the scene is one of organized chaos: most people are in constant motion, wearing weariness as well as their uniforms. Most of the outposts have been set up within buildings but a few are located outdoors beneath huge tents. It may be hard to tell exactly who is in charge, but soon enough you'll be directed to a table designated for processing volunteers. From there, volunteers will be assigned to tasks based on their skills - and not necessarily what one may prefer to be doing. Lives are still at stake. It is time to dig deep.

While participating in recovery efforts, people begin to come across… oddities. Things that do not appear to belong here. Some admit to hearing voices calling their names or whispering incomprehensible secrets, though they're chalking that up to exhaustion and stress.

Below are areas where volunteers are needed:

MEDICAL SUPPORT: A wide spectrum of support is needed, from doctors and magical healers to basic first aid. Individuals will be assigned based on their expertise to emergency clinics that are being set up across the city. There is very little time for bedside manner: the focus is treatment, especially in facilities handling more serious injury. Triage is in full effect.

Including, it seems, for injuries that do not have an identifiable cause, or are reportedly caused by one of the storm's more chaotic effects. Patients falling under this category are sequestered in a separate treatment area, or in some cases moved to an entirely different facility to provide adequate care. They must have stories to tell a willing ear.

DEBRIS CLEARING: At first glance, this is the most straightforward task and easily the one that has the most volunteers assigned to it. One hardly needs particular skills to gather up and deposit debris in bins that are bound for the growing mountain of wreckage outside the city walls. Items of a personal nature or anything that may have immediate use as part of recovery are separated out, but a more thorough sorting will have to happen later. The archipelago is not an endless bounty of resources, and everything that can be reused or recycled, will be. It is hard, messy work. Many volunteer crews push back heartache with song and recitation of well-known poetry to keep their minds focused.

The Sentry does need sharp eyes to deal with a few particularly hazardous areas. Anyone with structural engineering knowledge or similar may end up clambering through the carcasses of buildings, locating any survivors and shoring up instabilities as much as possible.

ORGANIZING AND DISTRIBUTING SUPPLIES:Between what the city and businesses provide, donations, and items collected as part of the debris clearing, there is a lot to go through. Supplies from the city and Sentry are already quite organized, but the rest will arrive at collection points in various states of disorder. Volunteers are needed for sorting, cleaning, and distributing supplies. This may be on an individual basis or to bring items to shelters, such as clothing, medicine, blankets, non-perishable food, and so on.

Items of a personal nature (e.g. pictures, anything with a name on it, etc) that are recovered by cleanup crews are set aside for people to try and claim later, but it can be quite a mess. Lost and found is by no means a priority, and those who come to ask about their property will either be turned away or told they can dig through the piles. There's no time to catalog it all until the city is in better shape.

REPAIRS AND CONSTRUCTION:The first order of business with repairs is to sort what actually can be repaired from what must be torn down and built again, better and stronger. So there is a sort of tiered organization: when the nature of repairs has been ascertained, usually by an expert with long experience at this sort of thing, then the task is assigned. There's some demolition, not all of it skilled, for which Dreamfolk with destructive talents or large muscles are in high demand. Priority in rebuilding is given to utilities and those centres where people are being given aid; dwellings are a close second, since the winter is still in full sway, but all efforts are calibrated toward helping the most vulnerable first.

Carpenters and masons are well loved here, but anyone with a talent for reinforcing structures, for hitting a nail with a hammer, or just plain old carrying heavy things and holding them in place, will be valued.

OOC: Anyone who volunteers will receive a unique discoverable based on which volunteer group they choose by responding to the comment below.

II. HAZARDS AND HUSHED WHISPERS

The trees that sprouted improbably from lightning strikes during the storm remain firmly rooted, wherever they are. Most of them grew from rooftops but a handful reside in the streets. Regardless of whether they have soil or sun (and in one unique case of a tree growing in a flood zone, no air), the trees seem healthy and content. They're also quite diverse, including fruit-bearing trees, evergreens, and several from unidentified species. One has a bioluminescent glow at night. Another grows perpendicularly out of the side of a building. None of them show signs of disease, damage, or lack of nutrients. For the time being, the official word is to leave them alone. Given their origin, no one knows how a tree might react to being cut down or uprooted or touched, and in any case they don't seem to be doing anything but standing there. Leaves fluttering a little in a non-existent breeze.

One glaring exception to this ambivalence is the grove of trees rooted in a section of the Skyway. Rumor has it that the cluster grew out of a single lightning strike, whereas all the other strikes only produced one arboreal interloper. About a week after the storm clears, Opara Core technicians erect a containment tent across the entire section to hide it from view, and to cover the roots dangling down through the track. By then, however, enough pictures of the trees have been taken to reveal the gnarled roots and branches are not made purely from wood: they're veined and interwoven with a silvery-blue metal. Even the leaves have silvered edges, giving rise to the theory that they're sharp as razors. The technicians and scientists who come and go from the site are tight-lipped about the situation and will evade questioning.

There's been no improvement or really any change in the status of those buildings now colloquially called 'drowned.' Obviously, no one is allowed inside. Those with a careful ear to the ground may overhear some whispers, that these buildings are -- wrong somehow, strange. But these conversations are hushed quickly. Whatever is actually wrong, it's something that those investigating are trying twice over to make sure doesn't get out to the general public. The clearest thing, perhaps, is that these buildings are not safe.

While it's not the first priority, as soon as there's some breathing space the Sentry has some crimes to look into. The storm's peculiar eddies affected many Dreamfolk, and while there's some debate about the level of responsibility given that many are reporting states of altered consciousness-- crimes still happened. People have still been injured or worse. This is not something that can be simply let lie. Further, cannier minds provide, there's the risk of some having committed opportunistic crimes and then trying to camouflage them under the veneer of a Dreamperson affected by the eddies. Sorting this distinction out comes first; then comes how responsible those under the eddies' influence actually are. Nothing is being allowed to simply slip by if the Sentry catches wind of it. Frankly, they're paying more attention now than they usually do, under the logic that now more than ever their order will be a source of reassurance.

OOC: If a character chooses to touch the lightning trees, please respond to the comment below.

III. WATCHERS IN THE WATER

The two ships that accompanied Melias are of a similar design to her own, but there is no visible cabin on them. In fact, there only appears to be one door on each, at the stern, but there's no visible means of opening them. The ships are cream-colored and almond-shaped, with whorls carved onto them that could be symbolic of the water - and, if one looks closely, there are words carved into them in an alphabet that has been extinct since long before the establishment of Aifaran.

The ships do not dock, but flank Melias' ship in the harbor, seemingly guarding it. If anyone gets curious enough to try and sneak aboard one of the two mysterious ships, they will be met with a feeling of intense amusement projected into their minds before something resembling a tree branch materializes from the hull, grabs them, and gently deposits them on the docks nearby. Any attempt to breach the chitinous hulls by violent means will be met with a wave of anger tinged with disappointment. Hull damage is quickly self-repaired. The ships seem to be alive after a fashion. That's crazy, though, isn't it?

If Melias learns of an attempt to board or damage the ship, she'll scold the Dreamfolk: "All in good time! Honestly, you lot are so impatient."

---

OOC Notes: Melias will be available for threading upon request.

Comments

[highprofilerichkid]

[ I - Repairs and Construction - OPEN]

Option A: Tony can't say that he enjoys disaster relief – it's physically and emotionally taxing, and rebuilding the wreckage of people's lives and livelihoods is never going to be, well, fun.

But it's important, and it's helping people in direct and concrete ways. He feels like he's doing as much good as he ever did fighting villains in the Iron Man armor – maybe more. It's rewarding, in its own way.

And now that it's been a few days and the bulk of the rescue operations have been completed, Tony can focus on the easier work of helping put the city's infrastructure back together.

At the moment, he's troubleshooting a generator that's supposed to be providing emergency power for a few residential streets until the grid comes back online. He's nearly got it working – unfortunately, he's wedged quite thoroughly underneath the whole contraption, and he's just realized that he needs a different tool from his kit.

"Dammit," he mutters under his breath, stretching his arm out as far as he can and blindly patting the ground. Where did he leave that stupid thing? The armor is occupied holding a large, heavy, and rather important component in place while he works, so it looks like Tony's going to have to extricate himself and find the wrench on his own... unless some helpful passerby wants to lend a hand.

Option B: Tony had found the clock half-buried in a pile of excavated mud while working a repair shift on some water lines that had been washed out by the flooding. It's an odd item, and an odd place to find it, so when he'd asked around and no one had claimed it, he'd decided to hold on to it. It's intricate and obviously valuable, and the inscrutable dials had intrigued him – surely the rightful owner won't mind if he tinkers with it a little, just to make sure it's in good working order.

It's been ticking steadily since he'd found it, but he'd started to disassemble it on his lunch break to check if any of the movements needed cleaning. Even if it doesn't look damaged now, moisture and rust can spell the end of delicate clockwork.

What he'd found had been... weird. The finely-crafted housing had remained watertight, but the array of movements inside are unlike anything he's ever seen. They certainly don't help elucidate what sort of time or other measurement the dials on the front are supposed to be keeping. Baffled, Tony had covered the half-gutted clock with protective cloth and returned to finish his shift.

And now that his shift is over, he's even more baffled, staring down at the clock as it ticks merrily along— fully reassembled and sealed up tight, as if he'd never even cracked the housing open.

He picks it up and turns it over in his hands. "What the heck?"



[ II - The Lightning Trees - Closed to Pepper ]

Tony sure is glad he was able to sneak a sample from the lightning tree growing from the Skyway tracks before the Opara techs cordoned it off, because this shit is amazing.

First of all, it had been no small task to get a sample in the first place: he'd had to slip out one of his gauntlets and use the laser cutter to slice off a sprig. Whatever the trees are made of, it's tough as hell.

The next attribute he'd discovered: within minutes, the little cutting had sunk tiny rootlets into the gauntlet he'd been carefully cradling it in. He's not even mad about having to sacrifice a few pieces of finger plating for that.

And when he'd gotten it home and started to run tests, he'd discovered that the silvery-blue streaks running through the wood are, as hypothesized, metal – and not just any metal. The alloy is mostly steel from the tracks, but whatever is mixed into it to give it that blueish sheen and incredible strength confounds all his attempts at identification.

As for how the cells are interacting with the metal, he can't tell much without destroying his little sprout entirely. Given how vigorously it had tried to integrate with his armor, though, he suspects there's a solution to that problem. He fills a plastic bucket with steel scraps from his workshop, nestles the cutting into it, and waits.

Sure enough, the little tree takes root, and within a few days it's sprouting new silvery, razor-edged leaves. Finally, a plant that Tony will be able to keep alive.

So, of course, when Pepper tells him about the peculiar effect of her own investigation into the lightning trees, Tony sees an opportunity. (An opportunity to find out more about his new houseplant, but also, maybe, an opportunity to cheer Pepper up a little.)

"Hold on, I'm gonna go get something from the workshop. I think you should take a look at it." His eyes are sparkling with excitement. He returns with the bucket, and holds it out to Pepper, grinning. "Check it out. It's a cutting from the trees on the Skyway tracks. Do you think you can try to, you know, talk to it?"

I A!

[afoolsgold]

A golden head pops into Tony's peripheral vision--upside down, at least from his perspective. The Fool, bending at the waist, peers beneath the contraption. He raises his eyebrows.

"Trouble?" he inquires innocuously. (As innocuously as one can manage while also being a nosy busy-body.)

[highprofilerichkid]

Well, it's the Fool's lucky day, because a nosy busy-body is exactly what Tony needs right now!

Tony has to crane his neck and contort his shoulders to see the source of the timely interruption. When he sees that it's the Fool, he breaks into a smile. "Oh, hey!" he greets brightly, and follows it immediately with "Ow! Shit. Hell," as he instinctively tries to sit up and smacks his forehead into a pipe. Dope.

"Uh, yeah, actually," he replies, rubbing at his head and wincing. "Can you get into my toolbox and pass me a wrench? It's the small ratcheting socket wrench – green rubberized handle, and it's, uh, got some numbers stamped on the shaft."

[afoolsgold]

"Can you get into my toolbox and pass me a wrench? It's the small ratcheting socket wrench – green rubberized handle, and it's, uh, got some numbers stamped on the shaft."

...ah. Well. Perhaps he should have expected this development.

"A ratcheting socket wrench," he repeats, articulating each syllable in such a way that he cannot possibly know what he is looking for. But let it never be said that the unknown has ever stopped the Fool from venturing forth--he won't be daunted now.

He steps over to what he can only suppose is the toolbox and bends over it to examine the selection of whosits, whatsits, and thingamabobs on display, carefully considers his options, and then plucks up the dullest looking one he can find. (Rubber, at least, he is familiar with.) "This one?" he asks, holding, uh, something, aloft for Tony's inspection.

[highprofilerichkid]

"Uh, no, that's a pipe wrench," Tony informs the Fool apologetically. "The socket wrench has a kind of a round head with a peg sticking out of it that rotates in one direction. The peg fits into one of these— he fishes around in his shirt pocket for the socket attachment he'd stashed there, tries to show it to the Fool, and promptly drops it, thanks to his grease-slicked fingers. He watches helplessly as it rolls out of reach.

Tony lets his head drop back to the ground, and stares up at the underside of the generator. He heaves a sigh. "Why haven't I built myself lab assistant robots yet?"

IB

[squidiot]

After Kai's near-splat experience, she's been carefully keeping away from anything resembling water. Or, well, trying to. When the storm had ended and she felt safe enough to poke her head outside, a gutter had almost immediately overflowed and would have dumped water on her head if she hadn't jumped back with a yelp. Maining a 'brella would have been useful, she thinks morosely. At least those can do double duty.

Still, she braves the outdoors to help people. It'd sure be selfish of her not to, especially since Sheena had helped her. While she squeaks when she gets too close to water, she's helping haul as much as she can (which isn't a whole lot, but every pair of hands and/or tentacles helps). Mostly she's on food-and-water-running duty, making sure everyone's got something to eat and drink on their downtime.

She hurries a bottle of water over to Tony, who's pondering something he must have found in the rubble. "Tony! I thought I saw you." Kind of hard not to, with that distinctive armor.

[highprofilerichkid]

"Huh? Oh— hey, Kai." It's good to see the squid kid out and about, even if the circumstances leave something to be desired. "Thanks." He takes the bottle of water and smiles, but it's all automatic – he's still distracted by the clock mystery.

"You didn't see anyone over here messing around with this earlier, did you?" he asks, indicating the clock. It's hard to imagine someone sneaking over here and reassembling the whole clock without Tony noticing, given that the table is in clear view of the work site. But the alternative is that the clock reassembled itself, which... okay, sure, that's not impossible, in Konryu, but it would be pretty damn strange.

[squidiot]

Kai looks at the thing that Tony's talking about, squints, and shakes her head. "Nope, I haven't seen anyone else over here. Why, what's up? Did it get broken or something?" She leans over the clock curiously. "Or did someone mess with the time? 'Cause that's definitely not what time it is. Maybe it got messed up in the storm?"

[highprofilerichkid]

"No, it got... Un-broken." He squints closer at the housing, but no new clues reveal themselves. "I found it in the mud, and started taking it apart to clean it out. But I just left it like that – I didn't put it back together." He raises his eyebrows. "And, yeah, I'm honestly not sure time is even what it's telling. Not the time anywhere in Konryu, anyway, based on what I can see."

[squidiot]

"Wait, what?" She blinks. "So it...put itself back together? Even for here, that's weird."

Kai leans in to give it a closer look. "I mean, I couldn't take apart a clock if you gave me a lifetime supply of shwaffles. And it just put itself back together? You took it apart, and it...it just decided that it didn't like that?"

[highprofilerichkid]

"Scale of one to ten, that's only a four, maybe a five on the Konryu Weird Meter," Tony jokes. "But it's definitely on there. It's a little bit weird."

Slightly weirder than the fact that the Dreaming's translation magic still insists on rendering some of Kai's language into almost-nonsense words like 'shwaffles'; slightly less weird than Kai's probably unintentional implication that the clock has likes and dislikes and might therefore be sentient.

Tony looks at the clock with sudden trepidation. "Well, I hope it didn't have an opinion. Otherwise I might have just pissed off a magical artifact, and I'm not sure what happens if a self-aware self-assembling clock gets mad at me."

tony WOULD love shwaffles

[squidiot]

Excuse you, Tony, shwaffles are the greatest culinary invention of our time. And you'd love them.

Oh. That's something she hadn't really thought about, and it's pretty concerning. "Do you think it could really do that? Get mad, I mean? 'Cause I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of a mad magical anything."

Really helping the situation, Kai.

[lasergrenades]

The distraction that Tony provides is welcome, and much better than sitting around at home mired in grief. It's easier to keep moving and keep her mind on something, whatever it is.

She smiles, bemused, when he walks back into the room holding a bucket with... a plant? An odd plant. A plant from the Skyway lightning tree grove. "Uh." Pepper squints at it, and then at Tony. "You know they were telling people to stay away from there," she scolds, with the fondness of long habit. Neither of them ever knew how to stay out of trouble all the time, and the grove on the Skyway would have drawn him like a moth to flame.

"Well, I can try," she offers a moment later, standing and taking a look at the little seedling. "...are you feeding it scrap metal? This thing is wild." Bending down, she peers at it curiously. "I haven't really figured out what they're saying to me yet, but I guess there's something to be said for practice. How big of a cutting did you take?"

[highprofilerichkid]

"I know, doing something that somebody told me not to do is very out-of-character for me," Tony retorts with cheerful sarcasm.

"Yeah, I figured that out when it started trying to make bonsai art out of my gauntlet as I was carrying it home," he explains, when Pepper comments on the unusual choice in growth medium. "It's gotten about twice as big since I cut it. Even if you ignore everything else, that's got to be proof that it's magical, because I've never been able to get a normal plant to grow that easily." The only organism he gets such vigorous growth rates out of is mold, generally.